Bits: win £50 for our 200,000th comment, 100% bonus buying IHG points, SAS / Avis deal

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News in brief:

Make our 200,000th approved comment

At some point this morning, approved comment number 200,000 will be made on Head for Points.

This is a slightly crazy and very impressive achievement – especially as well over 199,000 of them have been polite and thoughtful. And at least 198,000 have had no mention of Harry’s ‘place in the sun’ …..

Thank you to everyone for your contributions. The site genuinely would not be the same without you.

You can go onto a site like Fiverr and buy yourself thousands of fake page views, Twitter followers or Facebook likes. Online readership statistics can be faked in a hundred different ways. What you can’t fake, however, are 200,000 comments, and whenever we have a marketing meeting we always point to the discussions on HfP as the best measure of the success of the site.

Anyway …. we’re going to send a £50 Amazon voucher to whoever makes the 200,000th comment. Unless it is me or Anika. Or the person did not give their real email on the comment form. Anyway, we will decide on a winner and let them know.

100% bonus when you buy IHG Rewards Club points

IHG Rewards Club – the InterContinental, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza etc scheme – has brought back its ‘100% buy points bonus’ promotion. It is as generous an offer as you will ever see for IHG points.

The page to buy points is here. The deal runs until tomorrow night, 29th September.

Here are the standard purchase rates which do NOT include the bonus:

1,000 – 10,000 points for $13.50 per 1,000 points
11,000 – 25,000 points for $12.50 per 1,000 points
26,000 – 60,000 points for $11.50 per 1,000 points

You receive a 100% bonus with any order of 5,000 points or more.

With a 100% bonus, you would be able to buy 120,000 IHG points for (at current exchange rates) £515. This assumes your credit card has 0% FX fees.

Here are a few examples of how this deal may work.

At the top end of the IHG Rewards Club portfolio, you have InterContinental properties which top out at 50,000 – 60,000 points per night. That’s what you would pay for InterContinental Le Grand in Paris or the InterContinental Amstel in Amsterdam.

With a 100% bonus, IHG is effectively selling you a night at a 50,000 point property for £230 all-in. A 60,000 point hotel would be £275. At the bottom end, the points for a 5,000 point PointBreaks night would cost just £23.

You should look at this if you have a ‘buy points’ target for your Accelerate promotion – although it makes more sense to buy 5,000 and get the bonus than buy 1,000 for no bonus. If you are topping off your account, it is also a good deal irrespective of the exact cents per point cost. The maximum number of points you can buy per year is 120,000 (ie 60,000 plus the 60,000 bonus).

You can buy via this link.

PS. The image above is of the InterContinental New York Times Square. IHG and the owners of the hotel are currently heading to court – the owners want to drop the InterContinental brand, and IHG is insisting on $175m of compensation if they do. You might want to be careful about making any reward bookings here for late 2018 although there is no short-term risk of rooms being cancelled.

Good SAS EuroBonus deal with Avis

We don’t cover SAS EuroBonus much on Head for Points, although the scheme is an American Express Membership Rewards airline partner.

Until the end of October, SAS is running a very attractive Avis deal. Take 2 x 2-day Avis rentals before the end of the year (to be booked by 31st October) and you will receive a whopping 12,000 EuroBonus miles.

That won’t necessarily get you far, but you could do a top-up via Membership Rewards. You can get a night in a Radisson hotel for 20,000 SAS miles for example – that is how I got my free night at The May Fair in London 18 months ago.

Using them for flights is less attractive. You need 20,000 SAS miles, plus taxes, for a one-way European flight on any Star Alliance airline. That said, if you stretched the definition of Europe to its far reaches then it still may be an OK deal if the taxes made sense.

Full details are on this page of the Avis site.

Category

Avis and Avis Preferred, IHG Rewards

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Jena Palisoul says:

28 Sep28 September 15:32

Thanks for sharing the IHG bonus. I also checked my Accelerate promotion and have an additional bonus offer for purchasing points making it an even better deal. I usually save their points for the points saver 5000 per night deals. Lots of free nights for very little cost. Granted these usually aren’t fancy, but they do… Basically, everyone should check their Accelerate promotion too!
lev441 says:

28 Sep28 September 16:25

Most comments ever on a HFP post?
- TripRep says:
  
  28 Sep28 September 20:29
  
  possibly, could go over 400 today.
Stephen says:

28 Sep28 September 16:55

OT: I am exploring my options for a flight to Tokyo. What is the cheapest option to get there (which airline)? I am also looking into which FF program offers the best miles redemption from London to Tokyo.
Your opinion does count!

Thanks
- Rob says:
  
  28 Sep28 September 17:09
  
  Almost certainly Virgin Atlantic using ANA. I discussed this in my article on Virgin partner redemptions last weekend. Massively cheaper than using BA / JAL.
  
  You might want to price up Madrid to Tokyo on Iberia as the IB reward chart can be cheaper than the BA chart for some destinations, and taxes will definitely be a lot lower.
- CV3V says:
  
  28 Sep28 September 21:48
  
  Watch out for hotel costs in Tokyo, very expensive, good place to use up any hotel points you have.
mart says:

28 Sep28 September 16:56

Great site

OT cannot add my virgin flying club to my membership rewards account?
New card doesnt seem to want to take the membership number?
- lev441 says:
  
  28 Sep28 September 17:19
  
  Happened to me, may have something to do with details not matching exactly with address. Worth giving amex a ring and they’ll sort it for you.
- JamesB says:
  
  28 Sep28 September 17:42
  
  Having similar problems with Hilton; is it just the name, email and post codes that needs to match or the whole address line by line?
  - lev441 says:
    
    28 Sep28 September 17:47
    
    For Flying club it was the whole address that needed to match.
    - JamesB says:
      
      28 Sep28 September 18:17
      
      Thanks, I’ll get the addresses comparable and try again.
Jonathan says:

28 Sep28 September 17:25

Genghis, how many comments of the 200k do you think are yours!?
- Axel says:
  
  28 Sep28 September 17:41
  
  I really appreciate Genghis’ input to hfp.
  
  But if I was his employer or line manager I certainly would be having a quiet word with him.
  - lev441 says:
    
    28 Sep28 September 17:47
    
    Haha – Maybe he’s the boss!
    - Genghis says:
      
      28 Sep28 September 17:53
      
      🙂 even the boss has a boss. In my work it’s not how much time you spend at work but what you deliver. I deliver.
      - Adam G says:
        
        28 Sep28 September 17:56
        
        I wish I had a postman who would deliver
      - John Wallace says:
        
        28 Sep28 September 19:14
        
        Genghis ,
        I think you add value to this site too with your vast knowledge , along with a few others such as Harry . I have taken your advice this year on more than one occasion . Thanks for your constructive contributions !
        This is why this is a great site . Rob and Anika plus some great moderators !
      - the real harry1 says:
        
        28 Sep28 September 21:45
        
        heh heh! we had a brilliant bean counter called Bob – he sorted out all the regional finances & acted as a trusty who would presumably spot frauds (we had a lot of autonomy & loads of money flowing)
        
        when we had the intensive meetings about how our country was doing, Bob did his stuff then was free to do what ifs and other scenarios – he sort of bashed out stuff on Excel I guess that would have taken me hours, but Bob in minutes – plus better, well, tbh professional as opposed to cr@p – minutes, though, if not seconds
        
        so not too surprising that Genghis’s week is done round about Monday lunchtime, so to speak 🙂
The Original Nick. says:

28 Sep28 September 18:07

O:T, my 9000 Avios have just hit my IB account from the Avis competition..
David says:

28 Sep28 September 20:35

Ha – so have mine! I’d completely given up on those. Interestingly they’ve posted as +9,000, -9,000, +9,000 but the net result appears to be the same!
David Ward says:

28 Sep28 September 21:32

Buying points? . I look at weekends when there are 1000 bonus points for £5 ish and add them into my booking. Checking against my and my wifes IHG accounts. ( we only use hers for the additional easy points!) Points monitoring – much better rewards than playing suduko!